Past events

Pierre Martin-Dussaud
Institut National du Service PublicCan French Administration be more sexy than Quantum Gravity?

After ten years in science, wandering between quantum gravity and quantum foundations, I have entered l’Institut National du Service Public (ex-ENA) to pursue a career as top executive in the French administration. In this unusual talk, I will offer my personal take on the following questions: – Is there a life after academia? – What …

Pierre Martin-Dussaud
Institut National du Service PublicCan French Administration be more sexy than Quantum Gravity?
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QISS Spring School 2023

16-23 April 2023 One week graduate school featuring lectures by leading researchers in the fields of Quantum Information and Quantum Gravity. Held in the Goutelas castle in the south of France, from Sunday 16 to Sunday 23 of April 2023. The overarching theme of the research school is the understanding of spacetime and gravity through the lens of quantum information. …

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Markus Müller
IQOQI Vienna How spacetime constrains the structure of quantum theory

Modern physics has taught us that space and time are described by different “theories of geometry” in different regimes, from Galilean spacetime in Newtonian mechanics to semi-Riemannian manifolds in general relativity. In a very similar, but less well-known sense, classical probability theory and quantum theory (QT) are special cases in a large landscape of “theories …

Markus Müller
IQOQI Vienna How spacetime constrains the structure of quantum theory
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Sean Carroll
Johns Hopkins UniversityExtracting the Universe from the Wave Function

Quantum mechanics is a theory of wave functions in Hilbert space. Many features that we generally take for granted when we use quantum mechanics — classical spacetime, locality, the system/environment split, collapse/branching, preferred observables, the Born rule for probabilities — should in principle be derivable from the basic ingredients of the quantum state and the …

Sean Carroll
Johns Hopkins UniversityExtracting the Universe from the Wave Function
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Abhay Ashtekar
Pennsylvania State UniversityThe many faces of photons

In the standard Fock representation, the 1-photon Hilbert space is spanned by positive frequency, source-free solutions of Maxwell’s equations. The quantum information they carry corresponds precisely to the two radiative modes of the Maxwell fields.  However, this Fock representation is inadequate in a number of physical situations involving sources, and one then has to use appropriate non-Fock representations. …

Abhay Ashtekar
Pennsylvania State UniversityThe many faces of photons
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Wayne Myrvold
Western UniversityA Tale of Two Sciences, Both Called “Thermodynamics”

It has been occasionally remarked, but insufficiently appreciated, that there are two distinct sorts of endeavour that have gone by the name of “thermodynamics”. The first, which is in line with how the founders of the subject thought of it, is a theory about how agents with limited means of manipulation and limited access to …

Wayne Myrvold
Western UniversityA Tale of Two Sciences, Both Called “Thermodynamics”
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poster for Alexander Blum's virtual seminar, John Wheeler and Quantum Gravity, 7 december 2022, 4pm CET

Alexander Blum
Max Planck Institute for the History of ScienceJohn Wheeler and Quantum Gravity

John Wheeler was the inventor of quantum gravity – not as a formal program for uniting general relativity and quantum mechanics, but as the potential key to a theory of everything. In this talk, I will show how he first imbued quantum gravity with this new role in the 1950s and then how (and why) …

Alexander Blum
Max Planck Institute for the History of ScienceJohn Wheeler and Quantum Gravity
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Poster for Vlatko Vedral's QISS Virtual Seminar on 17 November at 4pm CET: Interference in QFT: detecting ghosts with phases

Vlatko Vedral
University of Oxford Interference in quantum field theory: detecting ghosts with phases

I intend to discuss the implications of the principle of locality for interference in quantum field theory. As an example, I will consider the interaction of two charges via a mediating quantum field and the resulting interference pattern, in the Lorenz gauge. Using the Heisenberg picture, I will claim that detecting relative phases or entanglement between …

Vlatko Vedral
University of Oxford Interference in quantum field theory: detecting ghosts with phases
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poster for the virtual seminar of Martin Plenio, 27 October at 5pm CEST testing quantum aspects of gravity at low energies

Martin Plenio
Ulm UniversityTesting of Quantum Aspects of Gravity at Low Energies: Discussion of Experiment Aspects and Possible Loopholes

Testing the quantum character of weak forces such as gravity requires both exquisite experimental control of technology and careful design by theory of the experiment set-up. At the same time, the interpretation of experiments that probe the interface between quantum physics and gravity also mandates that we examine carefully all the assumptions, however innocuous, that …

Martin Plenio
Ulm UniversityTesting of Quantum Aspects of Gravity at Low Energies: Discussion of Experiment Aspects and Possible Loopholes
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Poster for Ivan Agullo's Virtual Seminar Talk title "Entanglement in Quantum Field Theory", 4pm CEST

Ivan Agullo
Louisiana State UniversityEntanglement in quantum field theory

It is well known that, even the simplest states within the simplest field theories, are highly entangled. The main support for this fact comes from calculations of entanglement entropy between a region of space and its complement. I find two uncomfortable facts in the calculation of such entropy: (i) The result is actually infinite, and …

Ivan Agullo
Louisiana State UniversityEntanglement in quantum field theory
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